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Both sides of this debate seem to feel that humans are special, either by statistical improbability or by divine right, when in fact we are nothing but very complex organs by which matter exchanges information, and that bugs me. There emphatically is a "conspiracy" ("Civilization is a conspiracy against nature." -I forget[possibly me]) to suppress "creationism" or "intelligent design", but so what? I sometimes think these folks should be sent to East Timor or someplace so they will understand what religious persecution actually is.
Simple:
You have a universe where there is matter within finite spaces, and the matter moves around. When it does, it bumps into other matter, which also moves. You've got a little kinetic configuration. These configurations ramify into quite complex snowflakes of information being shuttled around. At a certain point, a threshold is reached where the information is so complex and sensitive that it is capable of responding, not just to "external" movements but to "internal" ones.
That's it. Everything else is perception. It is "intelligent," in that it is reactive, creative, and self-aware, but not "magic", ie does not require special conditions to function, and no external forces are needed to explain it, except, of course, the One Big Force, which we are not presently equipped to understand--nor ar we ever equipped to understand it, according to the creationists.
Robert Graves, when he wrote King Jesus, an account of the life of Jesus in which no magic occurs, said something to the effect that if God created everything (Graves believed in God but was unconvinced about his supremacy), he created natural laws, and he created them to accomodate miracles inasmuch as he wanted there to be miracles, and to suggest that he would violate the laws he himself set down simply to save something as paultry as the souls of men was tantamount to blasphemy, not just because it suggests that God might think twice, and is therefore fallible, but that he held the soul of man to be more important than his own work, which is idolatry, and which both sides of this debate are guilty of, but that nevertheless miracles happen, and can always be explained in natural terms. For instance, the Assumption of Jesus into Heaven is physically impossible, not just because we've never observed such a thing, but because we have observed what happens when matter disappears from the universe (very large explosions). So there must be some other explanation.
The other thing that horks me off is that people tend to refer to evolution as some kind of natural force, something that leads somewhere and exerts its own pressure, like wind. When organisms evolve, they are quite clearly evolving themselves, not being evolved, even if they didn't sit down and say, "Hmm, gettin' awful windy out here, better evolve me some fur." |
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